Many agricultural development projects, including Farm Africa’s, implement a Farmer Field School approach. This generally involves training contact farmers (CFs) intensively in relevant agronomic skills, and supporting them to pass on these skills and knowledge to a larger pool of adopter farmers using demonstration plots. This approach can be highly effective in bringing new knowledge and information to many more farmers than project staff could reach directly, and builds capacity for farmers to take ownership of continued development. Our Sesame Marketing Project, for example, delivered training and information in improved sesame cultivation to a total of 5,520 farmers, by directly training only 920 CFs. Despite these successes, this conventional approach has some challenges that limit its ability to deliver at scale. These include:

1. Timing: To be effective, training and extension services must be provided to CFs at an appropriate time in the agricultural season – it is no use learning how best to prepare your land once you have already planted. This means, firstly, CFs have to participate in several learning events at key stages in the season; with the associated time requirements and logistical costs of doing so. Secondly, there is a relatively small window in which the conditions are right to (a) bring the CFs together for training in a particular technique, (b) have them each go back and demonstrate it to adopters on demo plots, and (c) have suitable conditions for adopters to put acquired knowledge into practice on their own plots. Consequently, adopter farmers may have to wait until the next season to implement new techniques, by which time they may have forgotten some of the training.
2. Lack of flexibility in training: In the conventional approach, adopters have to physically travel to demo plots at a predefined time to take part in training. This can be particularly challenging for women farmers, who generally have many other household responsibilities and may be less able to devote a whole day to travelling for training. The approach also provides limited opportunity to revise learning once the particular stage in the agricultural season has passed.
3. Quality assurance: It is difficult to ensure all adopter farmers are receiving the same complete and high quality information as the CFs. Spot checks and follow-ups are usually built into these programmes, but it can take time to identify CFs who are consistently underperforming; by which time the adopters may have missed one or more seasons.

Why mobile technology?

In considering how to mitigate these challenges, Farm Africa identified a potential role for ICT as a learning tool. The expected benefits included greater control over the quality of material reaching farmers, as training content featuring input from local experts could be seen by anyone and revisited if required to refresh knowledge.

Adopter farmers would not have to travel to a fixed site at a specific time, but could rather learn more flexibly at a time that suited them, through shorter but more frequent sessions. CFs would effectively become knowledge portals, rather than teachers, and need only be trained in the effective operation of the tablet, requiring far less time than a conventional schedule of technical training.

Furthermore, as new knowledge emerges, such as suitable responses to a new local pest or disease, tablets could be updated with new content far more easily, and at lower cost, than bringing CFs physically together.

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